Editorial: FBI must purge its ranks
Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 14: The FBI seal is attached to a podium prior to Director is Christopher A. Wray speakin at a news conference at FBI Headquarters, on June 14, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
The news that the FBI fired Peter Strzok broke yesterday, and with that we can begin to see big-picture truth take shape about the bureau’s role in the Hillary Clinton investigation as well as the Russia investigation.
It does not look good for the leadership at the FBI. 2016 did not bring out the best in them.
Director James Comey was fired, as was Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and now Strzok, an FBI senior counterintelligence agent, has been terminated after being demoted earlier. He was a lead investigator on the probe into Clinton’s email server in 2016 before moving on to Mueller’s team.
Add to that Lisa Page, who was also on the Mueller team, and who was demoted before resigning earlier this year, and Bruce Ohr, who was stripped of his title as associate deputy attorney general.
Page had been texting anti-Trump messages back and forth with Strzok, and Ohr had been in contact with the authors of the Steele dossier shortly after the election.
FBI chief lawyer James Baker also stepped down amid allegations that he’d been involved in leaking classified information about the Steele dossier.
FBI agents need to keep their politics and biases out of their day-to-day behavior and certainly away from their workflow. The infractions that have continually come to light since the election of Donald Trump have served to degrade the public’s trust in the nation’s leading law enforcement agency and may have seriously impeded the duly elected president of the United States in performing his duties as described in the Constitution.
We can begin rebuilding the credibility of the FBI as soon as those who’ve acted deleteriously have been removed.
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